Introduction

The 1996 Broadcast News Speech Corpus contains a total of 104 hours of broadcasts from ABC, CNN and CSPAN television networks and NPR and PRI radio networks with corresponding transcripts. The primary motivation for this collection is to provide training data for the DARPA "HUB4" Project on continuous speech recognition in the broadcast domain.

Data

The speech files are available in a 19 disc training data set with one additional disc of development data and an additional disc of evaluation data. The following programs are represented in this corpus:

ABC Nightline

ABC World Nightly News

ABC World News Tonight

CNN Early Edition

CNN Early Prime News

CNN Headline News

CNN Prime Time News

CNN The World Today

CSPAN Washington Journal

NPR All Things Considered

NPR Marketplace

Transcripts have been made of all recordings in this publication, manually time aligned to the phrasal level, annotated to identify boundaries between news stories, speaker turn boundaries, and gender information about the speakers. The released version of the transcripts is in SGML format and there is accompanying documentation and an SGML DTD file, included with the transcription release. The transcripts are available via FTP.

Updates

There are no updates at this time.

Additional Licensing Instructions

This 'members-only' corpora is available to current members who can request the data at the listed reduced-license fee. Contact ldc@ldc.upenn.edu for information about becoming a member.